Sometimes a TV show does just about everything right, and yet . . . one still doesn't feel any need to make a habit of watching it.
Such is the case—for me, at least—with the new ABC drama Missing. Ashley Judd stars as a former CIA agent whose college-student son is abducted while studying abroad in Rome, Italy. . . .
The young crime-fiction aficionado Patrick Ohl writes: I have a confession to make. I love action movies, especially all those movies from the 80s and 90s starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, or any one of their rivals with the general exception of Steven Seagal. Dumb and derivative they may be, but I have plenty of fun watching the creative action, well-choreographed fights, and terrible acting. But above all, my guiltiest pleasures are watching Jean-Claude Van Damme movies.
I cannot explain this love of mine in any rational terms. Van Damme was at one point in his career considered Arnold Schwarzenegger without the price tag— like Arnold, he was consistently passed off as an American despite the heavily accented English, and his acting was almost always laughably bad. That being said, there are many minor gems in Van Damme’s career.
While literally thousands of fictional characters have fallen by the wayside over the past century, Sherlock Holmes remains imperishable. Well, why, exactly? Author Michael Dirda explains the appeal of genre fiction in his new book, "On Conan Doyle, or, The Whole Art of Storytelling." Dirda's attractive little volume manages to range far beyond Sherlock Holmes or even Conan Doyle. The book is a paean to imaginative literature and the profound impact it has over the span of readers' lives, from childhood into older age. TAC's Curtis Evans explores Dirda's book and the enduring appeal of genre fiction.
To be sure, Ian Rankin, the leading figure in the so-called “Tartan Noir” movement, has been a powerful force in moving British detective fiction away from its cozy, genteel, village and country house gentry stereotype, but in his own day Freeman Wills Crofts did much the same thing, albeit more gently, decades earlier. Both series are well worth reading and discussing today—the two detectives share a defining quality, one that readers will find bracing in an era seen as rife with immorality and excessive concentration of power.
I have good and not-so-good things to say about Temporary Duty, but I'll start with the good.
Considering its length and its price ($2.99 for the Kindle book), Temporary Duty is one of the best reading entertainment values you'll find today. It's quite long, and it's simply lots of fun. If you go back far enough to remember the sheer pleasure of the old space opera novels, like Heinlein's juveniles, that same pleasure is here in abundance—the wonder of space, the fascination of exotic aliens and strange cultures, the excitement of human ingenuity applied to interstellar challenges. You'll have a good time reading this book.
The most recent episodes of ABC's surrealistic, popular crime series Castle are entertaining and convey some important lessons about genre fiction. There are reasons people enjoy formula fiction.
By Shmuel Ben-Gad Spy stories are, at least sometimes, a secular equivalent of ghost stories, tales of mysterious menace. (Note that spies are sometimes referred to as spooks.) Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is unquestionably one of the best writers of spy stories in English. His stories are filled with mystery and menace and are distinguished by an air of realism, sophisticated plots, and polished prose. Ambler’s first tales appeared in the 1930s, and they reflect the tensions of European politics of the time. Ambler was then sympathetic to socialism, which is reflected in his stories of this period. The hero in two of his books, Background to Danger (1937, also published as Uncommon Danger) and Cause for Alarm (1938), is Zaleshoff, a Soviet agent. In an interview in the Times of London, Amber said, “Before the war I was very much an anti-Fascist writer, and after August 1939 and the Nazi-Soviet pact I`d really lost my subject matter. I was of the Thirties, and long after the tears had been wiped away there was still a sense of loss, a loss of belief.” Nonetheless, one of his major themes at this point was non-ideological and even anti-ideological: an ordinary Englishman visiting
By S. T. Karnick The general rule for mixed-genre fictions is not that you can expect to interest fans of both genres, but instead that you end up only with those who like both genres. That, I suspect, is a central reason why so few are attempted and even fewer are successful with audiences or critics. That seems to be what’s happening with Cowboys & Aliens, which opened to less-than-enthusiastic reviews and lower-than-expected first-weekend ticket sales even though it finished first at the U.S. box office. That would explain the unexpectedly weak performance during the film’s first weekend. What’s likely to suppress its box office appeal in the coming weeks, however, is the film’s lack of a strong story line and dearth of appealing characters. Directed by Jon Favreau (the Iron Man films, Elf, Zathura) from a script by multiple hands, Cowboys & Aliens has plenty of energy and action and is basically enjoyable, but it suffers from a curious lack of interesting plot twists and a rather glaring casting mistake. Most classic Westerns, contrary to contemporary beliefs, were given excellent, complex plots with strong character motivations. Unfortunately, plot is the great weakness of Cowboys & Aliens. We know from
I am tentatively prepared to declare Jeffrey Overstreet, author of Auralia’s Colors and its sequels, the best Christian fantasist working today (Walter Wangerin is doing other things). Possibly even better than me (!). What are the things that irritate me about contemporary fantasy generally, and Christian fantasy in particular? First of all, contemporary fantasists tend to use words badly. They strive for the same effects as Tolkien or Lewis, but lack the rich erudition of those scholars. Their prose is stilted and artificial, their word choices poor. Overstreet does not suffer from this problem. He uses words deftly, as Rembrandt used brushes and paint. Every description is vivid, every image apt. It’s a delight to read his prose. I was reminded of Tolkien’s use of Old English names to evoke unconscious meanings in the reader. Overstreet doesn’t use that technique, but the whimsical names he gives to humans and beasts had a similar effect on me. Contemporary fantasists tend to be derivative. When you read their work, you can easily detect a) which favorite writers they are trying to ape, and b) their political and social beliefs and prejudices. Overstreet’s work is as original as a new baby. He goes
By Lars Walker With apologies to Dashiell Hammett fans (after all, I am one myself), I think the archetypal hard-boiled private eye will always be Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Every hard-boiled shamus to this day—and likely far into the future—has to touch his cap, one way or another, to that tall Californian in the trench coat. Even if “he” is a she, even if the writer updates the concept by giving him computer skilz, endowing him with a regular girlfriend, or moving his office to an airplane cockpit. Even if he doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink, has adopted Buddhism, and treats his body like a temple. Loren D. Estleman bucks that trend. He flatters, sincerely, by imitation. His Detroit P.I., Amos Walker, could be Marlowe’s love child, or maybe Marlowe was cryogenically frozen. Amos Walker wears a hat (or did in the early books of the series, though he admits here that he doesn’t own a trench coat). He smokes and refuses to worry about it, and drinks with enthusiasm. His office, in a seedy building downtown, is exactly like Marlowe’s as far as I can tell, except for the view. The result makes for a very comfortable read for
Review of The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson By Curt Evans On the back cover of The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (2010), the blurb tells us that the fourteen essays contained therein represent the “very best in contemporary scholarship.” If so, this should be a matter of grave concern to people interested in the history of the American mystery genre before World War II, or in the preservation of what is best in the culture and fostering of good works in the future. As the Companion is a skimpy book of less than 200 pages and it has fourteen essays, potential readers should be immediately clued in to the fact that the essays tend to be rather cursory. A listing of the topics further reveals that the book’s coverage is esoteric, leaving noticeable gaps: Introduction (4 pages) Early American Crime Writing (10 pages, excluding footnotes) Poe and the Origins of Detective Fiction (8 pages) Women Writers Before 1960 (12 pages) The Hard-Boiled Novel (15 pages) American Roman Noir (12 pages) Teenage Detective and Teenage Delinquents (13 pages) American Spy Fiction (9 pages) The Police Procedural on Literature and on Television (13 pages)
By Mike Gray That indefatigable researcher Jess Nevins has published two complementary essays about pulp fiction from overseas (“overseas” of the United States and Great Britain, that is). We tend to forget (or, more likely, we never knew) that pulp was a world-wide publishing phenomenon not confined to an Anglophone readership. In his first essay, Nevins chronicles European SF pulps prior to 1914: The history of science fiction in America and Great Britain has been the subject of a number of popular and academic studies, and in general is well known, at least among science fiction fans. But the history of European science fiction, defined in this case as the countries of continental Europe, the Scandinavian countries, Russia, and Turkey, is less well-known. Less coverage still has been given to the science fiction pulps of Europe. In Europe, pulps were called everything from “dime novels” to “story papers” to “gialli” to “heftromane.” They can be distinguished from magazines by the quality of paper (poor), the level of pay for writers (worse), the number of articles or stories (fewer), and literary aspirations (none). Proto-pulps, in the form of pamphlets and chapbooks, were common by the 1550s, and the most popular printed
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